Consider This
by winterfellwolfling
Summary: "Yes but consider this for your otp: being reunited after surviving the zombie apocalypse unknowing if the other was alive or dead AU" Prompt courtesy of a random tumblr post.


It was nearly a year and a half since the world fell to rubble.

Naoki had been working overtime at the hospital when the corpses in the morgue started to move. His colleagues had been pondering over some strange disease that had shown up only hours before when he was drinking coffee and thinking of her smile. He had just pronounced the man on the operating table dead when the body sprang forward, lunging with lifeless hands towards the nearest nurse and beginning to devour her.

He froze.

Horrified, Naoki's hand instinctively found itself clutching the scalpel on the tray next to him. It was only moments before it was in the creature's head. The nurse had been bitten in the leg, but she was still alive. Grabbing her and all the sharp surgical instruments he could fit into his pockets, the young doctor ran like hell. As he was making his escape he came across Funatsu, with an equally panicked Marina at his side, and together the four got into Naoki's car and drove straight for the Irie household, swerving out of the way of bodies and the undead.

Kotoko had been attempting to cook a decent meal when her mother-in-law stumbled through the door, vacant eyes and black blood oozing from a bite mark in her neck. The young nurse's knife-wielding hand froze in midair. Yuki and Konomi, who had been studying in the living room, barely had time to dodge her attacks when Mrs. Irie came for them. Yuki kept screaming for his mother to come to her senses while Kotoko remained still, save for uncontrollable shaking that took over her body. She had seen movies and TV shows, images so horrific that in childish fear she had buried her head into Naoki's warm chest as he smiled and stroked her hair.

None of them were supposed to be real.

It was only Yuki's screams that brought Kotoko to her senses. Konomi's leg was caught in Mrs. Irie's grasp and she was violently thrashing in an attempt to escape. Kotoko finally regained her motor skills. Taking the knife with her, she called out to her mother in law, the only mother she had known for a long time, sobbing and pleading for her to become the incredible woman she loved so dearly. The woman's bloodshot eyes set themselves on Kotoko and her hands released Konomi's leg, aiming for her daughter's throat instead.

It was only Kotoko's instinct and terror that plunged the knife through her skull.

When Irie Noriko collapsed to the floor at Kotoko's feet, the young wife couldn't move. The shock paralyzed her, the grief shook her, the horror brought her to her knees by her mother's side and reduced her to blubbers and incoherent apologies. Yuki simply watched, knowing his sister-in-law well enough to give her some space, as he hid his girlfriend's face in his shoulder and held her close.

When Naoki finally arrived at the house in a desperate search for his wife, she, his brother, and Konomi were gone, along with all of the sharp cooking utensils and a large amount of food. All that was remained in the big house was a corpse rotting away in a puddle of blood. The doctor collapsed at the sight, a confused grief and silent tears taking hold of him. He wanted to reach out to his mother, to comfort her spirit in some way. The already rotten skin and her still open white eyes forced his hand to freeze in midair before limply dropping at his side. After a moment he mustered the strength to stand, calling out for the missing family members in a hoarse voice. He frantically searched every room of the house for people who were no longer there. The last stop, his bedroom – _their_ bedroom – was full of wedding pictures holding innocent smiles, clocks that counted hours of tutoring, and sheets that danced with tender touches and grasping hands.

The feeling of emptiness in that room made the cool and stone-faced genius break.

When Kotoko and the teenagers arrived outside of the hospital looking for her friends and husband, she was told by the head nurse – her mentor in her nursing training who now lay dying on the sidewalk – that no one inside survived. So many people had died, so many people had been brought in with the disease. Escape was nearly impossible.

Kotoko was always one for believing in the impossible.

The three were joined by Moto-chan, who had escaped by climbing out a broken window, and together escaped to the wilderness despite Kotoko's thrashing protests and desperate pleads to search the hospital for Naoki. It wasn't safe according to the nurse. What had once been a place of hope and healing was full of death and corpses and killers at every corner. 2 months later, when she dared venture in there alone when the rest were asleep, she would come to wish she had heeded her friend's warning. The smell of death. Patients she had treated reaching for her neck. Colleagues she had trained with lying headless on the tiled floor. Little boys with broken legs scarfing down human remains like birthday cake as they looked at her with hunger. She barely escaped with her life and her sanity.

Naoki immediately made his living room a surgical area when he tried to save the nurse from the initial attack. She begged for him to amputate her calf, the part of her leg that had been bitten. The genius almost didn't agree, knowing that he didn't have anesthesia and that if the loss of blood didn't kill her, the pain might. She insisted anyway. She would rather die a human than exist as a monster.

And that she did.

In the months without his wife Naoki was very calculating, logical, and cold. The huge mansion became the reminder each day of the emptiness that consumed his being. The walls no longer held laughter or joy, the kitchen no longer smelled of burning dinner or freshly brewed coffee, the bedroom offered him no solace. He made it his mission to find out where Kotoko was and what had happened to her. Every day Naoki went out to search a different location, check all the abandoned houses, find all the survivors and see if she was among them.

"Hey, do you really think she could have survived? It's probably hopeless, this is Kotoko we're talking about." Funatsu once said. Naoki, who was preparing to go out again, froze with an overwhelming feeling of rage at the audacity of such a suggestion and terror that he might be right.

Marina slapped her boyfriend's arm, not uncommon for the two of them. "Don't underestimate that girl. She's tougher than she looks."

"She's alive." Naoki assured his comrades and himself, still looking at his weapon. "She has to be."

Funatsu and Marina would often join him in his search, wanting to find her, their families, or any sign of life at all. Without guns, they were only ever armed with surgical tools, miscellaneous pieces of scrap metal, and anything else they could find. Their gated fortress offered them decent protection, but they still had to risk their lives going outside, if not to find people then to look for food or sources of water. Eventually, unsearched places became too far away to return back home every day, so the three said goodbye to their makeshift survival camp. Naoki took one last look at the picture in the foyer, destroyed by the photographer's blood splatters, before leaving.

Kotoko, Yuki, Konomi, and Moto-chan took up residence in a small house a few blocks from the hospital. Kotoko focused every fiber of her being on finding Naoki at first, refusing to believe that he had perished in the hospital massacre. It was the one thing she could still hold on to. The world had been burned in disease and carnage. She had killed the woman she admired most. Her friends and family were either dead or living in hell. Kotoko's only hope was her husband still breathing. Every day she searched, sacrificing her sleep, nutrition, and hydration in exchange for any sliver of hope. She didn't encounter many of the undead on the streets to begin with, but when she did it was always four against one, an easy win with their knives. After her mother-in-law, however, she hadn't slayed one with her own hands – she simply helped by being another number. The death still scarred her. Every night she would wake up screaming for the only mother she had ever known, and Naoki's arms were never there to comfort her.

It was when she came back from the hospital that she wouldn't speak for a few days. She had barely escaped with her life, being scarred both physically and emotionally from the experience. She felt that she was weak; even if she were to find Naoki, if he were in danger there would be nothing she could do. The next time she went out with the group, Yuki almost got killed because of her lack of focus. He didn't blame her, but she knew that she endangered everyone in her current state, and that was not another burden she was willing to bear.

He was sitting by the fire watching Konomi sleep and stroking her hair, thanking God that the delicate teenager had made it in a hopeless world, when his sister-in-law sat by him.

"Yuki."

He immediately gave her his attention, shocked that a word had come out of her mouth. Even when everyone was screaming at her to help him escape the zombie's grasp and yelling at her for standing by, she simply looked at the ground shaking her head with a dazed expression before turning and running back home.

"What is it?"

Her voice was quiet, as if she was afraid to ask her question. "Do you think…do you think Irie-kun made it?" She tried to keep an even tone, to remain as detached as she could when relaying her biggest fear to him, but on her husband's name her voice cracked and for the first time in a while Kotoko let herself cry.

"Sis-"

"I didn't see him." She stopped him and finally met her gaze with his. "At the hospital. It's not like…he couldn't get out. He's strong and smart. But even a genius…" Her stare was empty and defeated and it scared Yuki. "Could a genius even make it out of that?"

He wanted to ask what exactly she saw, what could have possibly reduced the always optimistic Kotoko into the hopeless shell that was before him. But he knew better, so he stayed silent.

"It's naïve, isn't it? To still think he's out there. To think that any of them…"

It probably was, and Yuki didn't want to give her false hope only to have her be crushed later. Yet if Kotoko didn't have hope, he didn't know what the girl was going to do next, how she would make it.

"It's true that he might not be." He admitted. "But if he is, how do you plan to survive long enough to see him?"

She didn't respond.

"Keep trying and keep fighting. Protect yourself and the people we have here so that you can see the people who aren't. Just live each day like that. And if they're gone then they're gone. But you're not. You're still here. So what are you going to do about it?"

Kotoko dedicated herself to becoming better. She scavenged for food, water, and weapons daily. She was always the first to defend her family from a zombie with the passion and determination she had shown before, even if she couldn't deliver the final blow. A very strong part of her abhorred the mere thought of stabbing someone who had once been alive; however, when one of them was inches away from giving Moto-chan a bite in the neck, not a moment of hesitation consumed her before she took the sharpest blade through the top of its head. In the olden times, Kotoko's fortitude and refusal to give up defined her – these were traits that made sure she survived.

Six months after the disease took hold, Naoki and his crew came across Kotoko's nursing friends, Keita and Tomoko, along with one of Keita's patients, Akiko. Four months after that, Kotoko was reunited with her father and father-in-law, as well as Kin-chan and Christine, who had all been taking refuge at Aihara since the beginning of the outbreak. Naoki found Jinko and her boyfriend and Satomi and family around month thirteen.

It was by the train station after a year and a half that it happened.

They had each been on searches with respective groups when they spotted each other in the distance. None of the others could clearly see faces, but they could each tell immediately. Her worn pink jacket, the remainder of a white blouse that had been continuously ripped and stained deep red, skinny jeans with tears all around the knees, skipping slightly in her step in spite of herself. His blouse with rolled up sleeves, the hint of a swagger he held in his walk, the hair that ruffled perfectly even in post-apocalyptic times.

Naoki stood still in his tracks, staring ahead of him and trying to work out if he was living reality. Kotoko stopped too, but only to take a better look at him after wiping tears from her eyes. All of their friends wondered what was going on with the two, but when Kotoko yelled "Irie-kun!" at the top of her lungs everything became clear. He began to walk towards her, gradually increasing his pace as the distance shortened. His wife, on the other hand, went straight for sprinting. The two approached each other uncaring of the stares or the grime or the blood on their clothes and on their hands. Kotoko slammed her body into his, leaping into his arms and sending him backwards a few paces. Her arms clung tightly around his neck while his grasped her and held her like he hadn't breathed without her presence. She was sobbing; he shed a few tears as his face buried itself in her shoulder. They shared passionate kisses, telling stories of how they had survived and how they had missed each other to the lips instead of the ears. Their mouths devoured memories and pain and lost time as the two stood in their embrace, only moving if it meant getting closer.


End file.
